500 Lei COA with crown

Romania's 500 Lei polymer series has been in continuous production since 2005, with the P#123 family accumulating suffix variants as the note underwent incremental security upgrades rather than full redesigns. The "c" suffix typically reflects changes to security thread specification or substrate supplier — neither publicly detailed by BNR — making precise attribution between variants difficult without side-by-side comparison under UV.

Polymer adoption by BNR predated most Western European central banks by over a decade, driven partly by the catastrophic counterfeiting problems that plagued the pre-denomination leu series in the late 1990s.